As a printing factory, we should not only care about the cost of printing, we should pay more attention to the hidden cost, to know how much it takes to print a book, and how much money can be made in the end.

What is the current situation of publishing industry in China today? Upstream has copyright authors and publishing houses, but also book number and copyright owners; middle is printing factory, do printing processing, many China book printers earn printing processing fees; downstream is bookstores, as well as network merchants. However, the whole Chinese publishing industry has not been integrated into a value chain.

According to statistics ,70% of our books after the first edition of the face out of print, will not be released the second edition. Because most publishing houses use the traditional printing method, the first thing to face is the problem of batch, batch can be done, batch small publishing houses dare not print.

If the inventory of books is compared to an iceberg. Floating on the water, we regard it as the explicit cost, that is, the publishing house to print, how much a book, how much money to give the author, this is the publishing house most clear. In addition, there are hidden costs, that is, the cost below the surface of the water. The hidden cost has inventory cost, fixed cost, occupied capital cost, also has the cost of scrapping, and the cost of moving goods, if the sale does not go out, it also needs return cost. These costs are hard to estimate before publishing a book.

Hidden costs are terrible, take up a lot of money, books can not be sold, facing the possibility of scrapping, according to statistics, the average scrap rate per book is between 20~30 percent.

When the new book is issued, you can choose the first edition to print out a small batch with digital printing. When the book is sent to the market, the sales volume can be transferred to the second edition to be printed in the China book printers. At this point, digital printing and traditional printing form complementary.

In terms of hidden cost, the inventory cost of traditional printing is relatively high, the inventory cost of digital printers is very low or even not; in terms of capital, the cost of traditional book printers is relatively high, the cost of digital printing is low or even not; in terms of return cost, traditional printing is relatively high, there are some logistics and return. In short, in the whole hidden cost part, digital printing is basically not available.